EAST claims that the new skimming devices used in these point-of-sale attacks typically use Bluetooth to transmit the stolen card and PIN details to the crooks, eliminating the need for the devices to be physically revisited. As ever, the advice is obvious: if anything ever looks suspicious at a terminal where you have to use your card, move on.

Elsewhere in the report, EAST reveals that the practice of skimming is growing most rapidly in the United States, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Thailand. The reason? Thieves have been unable to successfully hack the relatively new bank card security standard known casually as "chip-and-PIN", which is now commonplace across Europe and other parts of the world. That's because there's a chip on those cards that contains a secret algorithm to encode payment data, making it more difficult to clone. Clearly, the US has some catching up to do. [EAST via Krebs on Security]